Consumption
Literacy Project
Healthy SOil. Healthy plants. Healthy Bodies.Healthy Planet.
UrbanSEED
Youth Who Grow Food
Middle School / High School / Early College
UrbanSEED stands for Urban Students for Economic and Environmental Development through composting, growing food, and building community along the way. Our programming provides space for growing young adults to practice thinking critically, creatively, and independently about the connections between students' everyday lives, their community spaces, and the rest of the world. Our grassroots educational platform uses conversation as a tool to connect with each other, to make sense of the world, and better understand our relationships to it. From there, we have a better understanding for how to create something different then, make it happen in our lives, in our schools, and in our communities!
"Learning would then serve to educate students for the practice of freedom
rather than the maintenance of existing structures of domination."
bell hooks
Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, 2003, p46
MIddle School Programming
Gardening At Recess:
Eat. Play. Explore. Plant. Water. Grow. Repeat
This program came about in the most organic way. Our partner school garden needed to be tended, so we showed up during middle school recess. In the beginning there were a few students who came to help care for the garden, after a few months that number swelled to 15-20 students who come use their time at recess to come learn about the food and herbs we are growing. They help to weed, water, and replant. They ask questions, they explore how the plants grew from the previous week. This program exists as an early literacy to offer middle schoolers at our partner schools an opportunity to experience growing food and learn about it while they eat the fruits of their curiosity.
High School and Early College Courses
UrbanSEED Scholars:
Learning through
scholarship, compassion,
& action
This course appeals to the young urban leader that wants to learn how to grow food and who wants read the works of scholars who write about learning, culture & society, the environment, and food access. We will learn about localized social and environmental justice issues, we will grow food on campus, we will conduct an ethnographic research project to identify spaces in the community that we can grow food, and we will participate in some kind of shift. If this sounds like something you are interested in, -shoot us an email!
Lifeology Curriculum
Intro to Consumption Literacy:
Environment, Society, &
Everyday Life
This course is an exploration in scholarship and the representations of consumption in our everyday lives. We will examine topics of social and environmental justice through investigations of natural resource consumption within everyday life. Discussions will focus on food, water, transportation, energy, urbanization, and the influence of consumption cultures on self-identity. Through a storytelling approach, we will learn ethnographic strategies to identify and analyze our life experiences to find evidence of consumption cultures at local and global levels.
UrbanSEEDInternships:
Youth Urban Farmers,
Composters, and
Educators
This internship is for young urban farmers who share the desire to grow food in support of community resiliency. Our community gardens are outdoor classrooms that we use to work with local elementary schools to teach about reclaiming soil through composting, sharing knowledge about growing food, and building community sustenance. Are you interested in an internship in Education, Food Justice, or Urban Agriculture? -Shoot us an email!